the greatest vintage apple-collection

Blue and White

As the successor to the Power Macintosh 6100, the blue and white Power Macintosh G3 immediately captivated me in 1999. Its design was fresh, bold, and distinctive: blue and white, rounded corners, and a large, blue Apple logo with the letters G and 3 on the side. In an era when computers were mostly beige and angular, the G3 was a real eye-catcher – very much in the style of the iMacs of the time.

To match, there was the 15-inch TFT monitor, also in blue and white. This duo looked perfectly integrated. The TFT was my first flat-screen monitor ever – and one of the first of its kind on the market. Back then, it seemed simply ingenious. Today, with some distance, it's almost amusing how weak these early TFTs actually were: low brightness, poor viewing angles, and image quality that would hardly be acceptable today.

As compelling as the design was, everyday use of the blue and white G3 was a real challenge. It was one of the most temperamental Macs I've ever owned. The system apparently suffered from overheating, and the software wasn't up to the standard one expected from Apple. This was the era of Mac OS 9, when Apple seemed to be in a rut and Mac OS X was already on the horizon.

However, the G3 was too weak for the stable Mac OS X 10.4. While the earlier versions, 10.2 and 10.3, would run, they themselves weren't yet truly mature. Thus, the G3 remained stuck in a kind of limbo – between an old operating system reaching its limits and a new one that wasn't quite a perfect fit.

Even after more than 25 years, the blue and white G3 still exhibits its quirks. The video output, in particular, is often problematic. It frequently requires several restarts, pauses, and a bit of patience – and then suddenly the picture appears. I own four of these G3 models, and none of them are truly reliable.

I've never been able to definitively explain why this is the case. My guess is that it's less the hardware and more the software and the interplay of the components that give these Macs a certain unpredictability to this day.

Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of this—the blue and white G3 remains a fascinating piece of Apple history: a design icon, created during a transitional period when Apple was experimenting with many things and not everything was successful.